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Consumer Protection Updates

Warning that “tracking and targeting of consumers online have reached alarming levels,” a coalition of 11 consumer and privacy advocacy organizations today sent a letter to Congress outlining the protections any online privacy legislation must include.

As Oregonians continue to endure the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, OSPIRG set out to discover what consumers are really paying to maintain basic banking services in Oregon, and what sorts of fees and financial institution policies have the biggest effect on consumers' bottom line. OSPIRG staff and volunteers analyzed 64 checking accounts offered by ten banks and eight credit unions in Portland, Eugene and Ashland.

Despite the commitments made by the FCC and the President, Republican members of the Senate have introduced a measure that would prevent FCC action on Network Neutrality and leave consumers on the Internet vulnerable to unfair and discriminatory practices.

A Public Interest Internet Agenda prescribes broadband policy solutions that are tied to the common good and our nation’s prosperity. Connecting our entire nation to the Internet at broadband speed is the key to economic development, improved healthcare and education, energy efficiency, robust democracy and open government.

Consumers are increasingly relying on the Internet and other digital services for a wide range of transactions and services, many of which involve their most sensitive affairs, including health, financial, and other personal matters. At the same time many companies are now engaging in behavioral advertising, which involves the surreptitious tracking and targeting of consumers. Click by click, consumers’ online activities – the searches they make, the Web pages they visit, the content they view, the videos they watch and their other interactions on social networking sites, the content of emails they send and receive, how they spend money online, their physical locations using mobile Web devices, and other data – are logged into an expanding profile and analyzed in order to target them with more “relevant” advertising.

A coalition of ten consumer and privacy advocacy organizations today called on Congress to enact legislation to protect consumer privacy in response to threats from the growing practices of online behavioral tracking and targeting.

The tips and know-how included here are good advice in any economic climate, but they are especially important in this economy. Credit card debt, consumer credit scores, and identity theft are some of the most common problems facing consumers today.

This report explains why Congress needs to enact a strong final law that includes all of these key uncompleted reforms - a new toy standard that requires mandatory safety testing for toys, a ban on toxic phthalates, and whistleblower protections - while rejecting industry’s eleventh-hour demands to add new and unprecedented limits on state authority to enforce and enact product safety laws.